Computer systems originally limited user input to a few standard devices capable of generating standardized and readily and clearly defined inputs, such as the keyboard and various pointing devices, such as a mouse or touchpad. More recently, however, there has been a general recognition of the need and usefulness of systems that accept less standardized user inputs, such as handwritten inputs through, for example, digitizing tablets and pens.
The common problem faced by all such systems is in developing handwritten character input processing methods and mechanisms that can rapidly and reliably recognize inputs that have no standardized characteristics. The size, spacing, orientation and even the shape of handwritten characters entered through a digitizing tablet and pen, for example, vary widely from user to user.
Various systems have been developed for handwritten character recognition, but most handwritten character recognition systems are limited in that they depend, to a great extent, upon the dynamic characteristics of the formation of characters as they are entered. That is, the order and orientation of the character strokes, and even they direction in which the strokes are formed, are all used to identify characters as they are entered.
There is still a significant problem, however, in recognizing handwritten characters when the dynamic characteristics of the characters creation is not available to be used in the recognition process. An example of such is the recognition of handwritten characters in previously created documents, such as documents that are scanned into a system as images after their creation.
Another problem is that that no handwritten character recognition system is completely capable of recognizing all handwritten character inputs with complete accuracy and reliability. Literally every handwritten character recognition system provides outputs that, for virtually every string of input handwritten characters, contains at least some ambiguous results, that is, characters or combinations of strokes, that cannot be recognized by the system. Some attempts have been made to solve this problem, for example, by use of spelling checkers, but these approaches have been generally unsuccessful.
The present invention provides solutions to these and other problems of the prior art.